


should I tear my heart out now? (everything I feel returns to you somehow)

by madasthesea



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Brief suicidal thoughts, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Crying, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Panic Attacks, Past Character Death, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:48:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25826917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madasthesea/pseuds/madasthesea
Summary: He’s been reborn many times in his life; forged anew in refiner’s fire. A phoenix in the ashes.The world that Tony steps into when he exits the Milano is still buried, choking in ash, unsure yet of what it will be when it finally licks its wounds clean.Tony isn’t sure of what he will be, either.Or: Tony mourns.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Tony Stark & James "Rhodey" Rhodes
Comments: 46
Kudos: 222





	should I tear my heart out now? (everything I feel returns to you somehow)

**Author's Note:**

> I am resurfacing briefly to drop this little angst-fest for Peter's birthday. Enjoy ;)
> 
> Title from The Only Thing by Sufjan Stevens (suicide tw for the song). Also suicidal thoughts are discussed briefly in the first couple sections.

> _No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear._
> 
> _C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed_

Tony remembers that first step out of the cave in Afghanistan, holding the car battery and squinting in the sunlight, seeing his guns in the hands of his kidnappers and _knowing_ , then, that his life would never be the same. So, too, does he recall the first wobbly flight in the Mark II armor, bolting from his garage with a thrilled whoop of joy sitting in his throat, racing into a world unlike any he’d ever known.

He’s been reborn many times in his life; forged anew in refiner’s fire. A phoenix in the ashes.

The world that Tony steps into when he exits the Milano is still buried, choking in ash, unsure yet of what it will be when it finally licks its wounds clean.

Tony isn’t sure of what he will be, either.

“I lost the kid,” he confesses, then crumples in the face of this new world: this world without Peter.

“Leave me alone, Rhodes.”

Someone has been with him from the moment he gained consciousness and he’s sick of being watched. He looks like the same person—a little gaunter, a little rougher perhaps, but still like Tony Stark—but he isn’t. He’s a doppelganger, a replica. A ghost.

“No.”

“Go away, James.”

If they stop looking at him, he can stop existing. That’s how it works, right? Quantum physics, Schrodinger’s cat, the “ _wanted: dead and alive”_ t-shirt Peter used to wear. He’s only alive because they think he is.

“Nope.”

Tony’s patience is as thin as he is right now.

“I want to be alone,” he snaps. His snarl used to be impressive but now he just feels like a kicked dog, barking as it hides.

Rhodey finally closes the book he was pretending to read, sighs heavily as looks up at Tony.

“You’re on suicide watch, Tony,” Rhodey says. Tony freezes, the heart monitor sluggishly picking up its pace.

Rhodes settles back a little bit in his chair, tilting his chin up defensively. “Suicidal tendencies double in bereaved fathers.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Tony says numbly, shying away from the very thought. Suicide sounds too violent. He doesn’t want to _die_ , he just wants to... fade. Like Peter had. But he doesn’t know how to explain the difference.

“I'm really glad to hear that, Tones, but—”

“I’m not going to because I don’t have to,” Tony interrupts, his vision blurry but not from tears. He thinks he might pass out. He hasn’t said it out loud before but it’s true, and the words tumble out before he can stop them. “I died when he did. This is—I’m just—” Peter’s English homework is still sitting down in the lab, he thinks. They’d read lines together because Peter wanted to impress that girl he was smitten with, in his nerdy, awkward, adorable way. _Out, out brief candle._ _Life’s but—_ “—a walking shadow.”

Rhodey purses his lips, his eyes suspiciously bright. “Tony. Losing what—You’re still alive. It might not feel like it right now, but life goes on.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t,” Tony whispers. Then he turns onto his side, thinking that he probably hasn’t made the point he meant to.

The constant guard doesn’t stop and Tony knows he doesn’t need it, but he can’t blame them for not believing him.

Bruce falls asleep the third night in. Tony’s mind feels hazy, thinks they might have laced his nutrient saline with a sedative.

He wants out of this bed. He wants to not be looked at but the entire west wall is glass windows.

He knows how to take out his IV without too much mess, unplugs the heart monitor before he takes that off too. The door is propped open.

He spills forward like a puppet on strings, fast and uncoordinated, every limb numb. His head is swimming like he stood up too fast, but the feeling only intensifies the longer he’s up.

He falls a hall and a half away from the Medbay, but he crawls to the wall and hauls himself up before FRIDAY has even finished asking if he wants her to get anyone.

By the time he reaches Peter’s room, he’s running into the walls, tripping over his own feet, but he has to get there. He has to do this because he can’t do anything _but_ this.

Tony’s hand trembles as he turns the knob. He falls inward as the door opens, barely catches his own weight and then his breath as the sight registers: messily made bed, books piled on his desk. There’s a picture of Peter, May, and Ben on the nightstand. 

He clambers drunkenly to the far side of the bed and pulls the covers over himself. The sheets smell like Peter.

His breath stutters. His eyes burn.

The sheets smell like Peter but his mouth tastes like ash.

He closes his eyes and imagines what it feels like; burning, tearing, rending. Ignition, combustion, extinction on an atomic scale, on every level of existence. To be so afraid, and so desperate, and in so much pain.

He thinks it probably feels like this.

He turns his face into Peter’s pillow and weeps.

He wakes up to someone crawling into bed with him and he wonders that he doesn’t think it’s Peter, not even for a delirious, half-asleep second. People talk about forgetting, about turning and expecting them to be there, about denial and acceptance and how it takes time, but Tony doesn’t understand that because the knowledge lives in his chest, gnawing and biting and shredding and no amount of denial will take the pain of it away. He wears it like a funeral shroud, breathes it like toxic fumes. It pounds through his veins like poison.

His eyelashes stick together when he opens his eyes. He can’t remember the last time he’d cried himself to sleep, but the pillow under his cheek is still damp with tears.

It’s Pepper, her hair splayed over Peter’s second pillow, the one he never used but Tony did when he came in to comfort him from a nightmare.

“Thought you’d be in here,” she whispers, reaching across the distance and taking his hand. “You scared us.”

Tony blinks at her, his eyes itching and swollen. He knows he should apologize but it seems so pointless. He can’t find it in him to be sorry, not between the emptiness.

Pepper watches him and he watches her back. The light from the hallway paints a stripe of gold in the dark room, the curtains drawn closed.

He wants her to understand that this is all he will be, now. There is no moving on from this—Peter was the gravitational center that was holding him together and now he’s spinning out of control: the world has lost its shape. Everything is trivial and small. Everything is very, very still.

Tony closes his eyes. Pepper puts her hand on his cheek.

“He was—” Tony whispers.

“Your son,” Pepper finishes. “The one thing you can’t live without.”

Tony aches down to his bones. “One of two,” he assures her, because that’s never changed. If he’d lost both of them, he would have had Danvers chuck him back into space. But without Peter—

“I am—I will always be... half alive.”

Pepper nods, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “I can handle that. Half’s better than nothing.”

She pulls him to her, their tears smearing together as she kisses his forehead.

“You deserve better.”

“But I want you.” 

It’s the first time Tony’s ventured to the common areas and he regrets it the second he sees Steve. Natasha’s there, too, and Bruce, in the corner with his headphones on, but it’s Steve he doesn’t want to see, and Steve who sees him before he has a chance to escape.

Rhodey’s guiding him along by the elbow and he’s embarrassed and snappish.

“How are you feeling, Tony?” Steve asks politely as Tony leans against the kitchen island while Rhodey reheats some leftovers for their lunch.

“Spectacular,” Tony bites out. Steve gets the hint and doesn’t say anything else for several long minutes, merely eating his sandwich and watching Nat as she starts making tea. She keeps giving Steve a look, like she’s urging him to do something.

“What,” Tony finally demands. “For a spy, Romanoff, you’re not being very subtle.”

Natasha gives him a dangerous smile. “Maybe that was the point. Steve, do you have something you want to say?”

“I think he would take it better if I wasn’t the—”

“Rogers.”

Steve sighs, then looks at Tony.

“We’re planning the memorial for those that... we lost. We wondered if you wanted Peter to be under Peter Parker or Spider-Man.”

Tony thinks he might throw up his lunch.

When they’d told him that May was gone, he’d felt a traitorous, disgusting, despicable stab of relief that he would never have to see her live in a world without Peter. He thought about how, with her gone, he wouldn’t have anyone he would have to be strong for, no one to question if his level of grief was earned. And then the numbness crept back in because it was too much for one person to bear.

He misses her terribly now because she would understand the visceral abhorrence he feels at the thought of Peter’s name of a memorial to the fallen. 

“Neither.” He tries to make it sound imperious and unquestionable, but his voice cracks. He stands, shakily, leaning heavily on the counter as he does.

Steve clears his throat. “Alright. For the private funeral, I’m assuming Peter would be best.”

He wonders how no one else is losing their balance when the whole world is tilting off its axis at the mention of Peter’s funeral.

“No,” Tony rasps. “No. We’re not having a funeral.”

“Tony,” Steve sighs, in that way that used to make his hackles raise, but now it doesn’t make him feel anything but tired. “Peter’s gone.”

“No, he isn’t!” Tony snaps, his head jerking up. Steve’s eyes widen and he looks impossibly sadder. Natasha steps forward, dread in her eyes and Tony knows what they’re thinking. “He isn’t _gone_. He isn’t _lost._ He’s _dead_. Just say it. He’s dead. Why do you all keep talking like I don’t know? Like it isn’t all I think about?”

He glances around him, at all the people looking at him in pity and shock, and feels the confession build up in his throat like bile, hot and acrid. “I held him. I _watched_. I didn’t wash his ashes off my hands for three days because that was all I had—”

Tony breaks off, grinds his teeth together to hold back a sob but the sound leaks out anyway.

“Peter’s dead,” he says breathlessly. “He’s dead. If he was gone, I would bring him back. If he was lost, I would find him. But he’s dead and that is the only thing in the universe I can’t fix.”

He holds Steve’s gaze for a moment, takes a shuddering breath, and then crumples forward just as Rhodey rushes toward him, catching his shoulders.

His friend lowers him to the tile floor, leaning him against the island to steady him.

“Rhodey,” he gasps. “Rhodey, do you remember—do you remember when my parents died?” Tony asks, his voice coming in spurts as his lungs spasm in pain at the thought of taking in oxygen when Peter isn’t. “Rhodes, do you—”

“I remember—”

“And you, you found me, drunk on the floor,” Tony hiccups. Someone thumbs a tear off his cheek, but he doesn’t know who, can barely make out the shapes in front of him. He clutches at Rhodey’s t-shirt, his arms shaking.

“Yeah. You were one shot away from alcohol poisoning,” Rhodes sighs, wrapping one hand around the back of Tony’s neck and supporting his head.

“James,” Tony says, his voice broken. “I’d rather relive that night a thousand times than know what it feels like to lose my kid.”

Rhodes’ face crumples and a tear spills over, clings to his eyelashes. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”

Tony’s next sob is muffled against Rhodey’s shoulder as his friend clutches him to his chest, Tony’s tears soaking the fabric of his t-shirt.

It’s only when the cabinet behind him starts shuddering, too, that Tony realizes it isn’t a cabinet at all, but Steve, supporting both of them. Tony turns his head and meets Steve’s red eyes, then glances to his right and sees Natasha, her bottom lip trembling as she once again wipes a tear from his cheek. Bruce is knelt behind Rhodey, his face pinched in concern and pain.

“I can’t bury an empty coffin. I can’t read his eulogy.”

Steve nods, tears shining in his eyes. Tony unclenches one hand from Rhodey’s shirt and holds it out, Steve instantly grabbing it.

“I’m sorry about Sam,” Tony says, and for the first time the loss of everyone else hits him. The whole world is grieving, an entire universe full of fathers who have lost their children and suddenly don’t understand what their purpose is anymore. It aches all the way down to his atoms, to the bits of stardust in his veins that he shared with those people, however many lightyears away. “I’m sorry about Bucky. I’m so sorry.”

Steve bows his head, but it doesn’t hide the tear that falls onto Tony’s arm.

If Thanos had had any mercy, Tony decides as most of what’s left of the Earth’s mightiest heroes sit on the kitchen floor and weep, he would have killed them all.

Tony used to have to fight to escape his own whirling thoughts, but now he lets himself be submerged in them, in the roiling, tumultuous sea that Peter’s absence has created, like a hole punched through the center of the earth.

He lies paralyzed in bed as anxiety tears through him. He isn’t sure what he’s afraid of—he’s already lived his worst nightmare, but not quite because Pepper—

Pepper isn’t in bed next to him.

“Pep?” He asks, too quietly, being yanked back into his own body. He has been so horribly selfish recently—Narcissus staring at his own reflection but not because he loves it; because he loathes it so impossibly much. His own continued existence often seems so detestable, he acts as if he’d died anyway. It is unforgivably cruel to those around him, but he cannot make himself stop.

“Pep?” he asks again, stirring from his resting place.

She appears in the doorway of the bathroom, her jaw set and shoulders squared.

“You ok, honey?”

“Yes,” she says breathlessly. She comes forward, puts a hand around his stomach as she passes and leads him back to the bed. He sits heavily, watching her in dull confusion as she sits cross-legged on the rumpled covers.

“Tony,” she murmurs, curling an arm around her stomach. “I’m pregnant.”

Tony blinks and the bedroom around him disappears, diffusing like a mirage in the desert to show the reality that he lives in.

He has been huddled in the skeletal remains of a once-great forest since Titan. The fire is out but he’s still waiting to burn and here is Pepper, kneeling in front of him with a sprouting seed in her hands, the green of new life nearly foreign in this bone gray world.

One new tree. She is promising one new life, but the atmosphere is still so choked with toxic air the sunlight can barely reach the earth and one tree is not enough to purify it all.

He reaches a trembling hand forward and stops short of brushing his fingers against Pepper’s knuckles.

Surely, it will die if he touches it. Surely he can’t have this.

Pepper’s face falls. Tony forces himself to take a breath of poisonous, burning air.

“I love you,” he says because even the end of the world cannot change that fact. “I love you.”

He kisses the apple of her cheek, the corner of her jaw. He kneels on his bed in his room and does not let himself think about how quiet the forest is now that all the birds are dead; he kisses her stomach over her baggy t-shirt.

“I love you.”

He doesn’t know how to love a child that isn’t Peter.

Growing up, Tony had always wiggled his loose teeth. He’d push on them with his tongue, pleasure-pain shooting through him, until they finally came out.

He sits on the porch in one of the wicker chairs Pepper had picked out and grinds his teeth—it was a habit he’d kicked in his first year of MIT, changed it out for worse ones—and thinks about holding an infant in his arms and being expected to move on.

The screen door swings open and Rhodey walks out, his leg braces whirring softly. He’s got two glass bottles in one hand and he passes one to Tony, who snorts upon seeing the label for root beer rather than anything with alcohol.

“Pepper told you,” Tony asks blankly.

Rhodey settles into a chair with a sigh, pushing it back on two legs until he’s balanced, like he’s a sixteen-year-old instead of a decorated military man on the far side of fifty.

“Yep. Congrats, man.”

Tony hums. “She can tell I’m not as happy as I should be,” he murmurs. “She thinks I don’t want it.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t imagine why she thinks that then.”

Tony shoots him a sideways glare—he’s not in the mood for levity or being congratulated, he wants to brood. He’s always been a very good brooder, an overthinker. Someone that pushes on a bruise.

Rhodey pops his soda open with a fizz, then reaches over and does Tony’s too. Tony takes a sip, just for something to do.

“Know what I think?” Rhodey asks.

“I get the feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“I think you’re a great dad.”

Tony looks down at his hands, twists the bottle around. “I don’t think I’m a dad anymore. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to do it again.”

“You don’t grow out of being a dad, Tones. That baby will come and suddenly every instinct and emotion you felt with Peter is going to come right back.”

Tony can’t answer, unsure how to say that that might be the thing he’s most afraid of.

“Peter would love having a little sibling, you know that, right? He’d be thrilled.”

Talking about Peter hurts, but not talking about Peter for so long has been like slowly suffocating. He can’t stop the way his mouth twitches up.

“Yeah,” Tony sighs, nodding. “They’d be absolute terrors, the two of them together. My DNA and that kid’s talent for trouble? I’d be doomed.”

It’s like pressing on a bruise, picking at a scab. It hurts. It hurts, but he can’t stop.

“He was so freaking smart, you know? Just brilliant, some of the stuff he came up with...”

Rhodey laughs. “The kid drove you half out of your mind, Tones, what are you talking about?”

Tony snorts, takes a swig of his tepid root beer. “Yeah. Oh, do you remember that time he tried to make me a birthday cake?”

Rhodey chokes on his own mouthful of soda. “Geez, how long did it take you to get the batter off your ceiling?”

“It was still there,” Tony cackles, “when—”

Pleasure-pain, from his teeth to his toes.

“Peter climbed up and tried to scrub it off,” Tony continues, hiccupping over the gap. “But it had fused with the building, I swear. Would take a nuke to get that stain out.”

Pleasure-pain. Exquisite, tender. An open wound weeping blood and affection.

Tony clenches his jaw hard, grinding his teeth together.

“She wants me to go to a support group,” Tony suddenly blurts. “In the city. It’s for dads, all their kids—”

“It might be good for you,” Rhodey says, scratching at the label on the root beer bottle with his thumb.

“It won’t be. Not that. I’ll... read whatever, do a blog, some other self-therapy nonsense. I can’t go.”

“Why not? They’re all in your situation, Tony. It’s for dads like you.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s for dads whose kids died. I killed mine.”

Rhodey nearly tips too far backward in his chair, windmills for a second before crashing back to all four legs.

“ _What?_ Tony—”

“I killed theirs, too,” Tony says robotically. “How could I possibly go and meet them all and talk like I’m one of them, all the while knowing that I killed their babies?”

Tony grinds his teeth harder, pressing until it hurts, until a muscle in his jaw seizes. Rhodey stares at him in horror for a moment, then shakes his head with a heartbroken expression on his face.

“You didn’t kill them,” he breathes. “Tones, you didn’t.”

“I didn’t save them.”

“Neither did I,” Rhodey says, lifting his chin and accepting his defeat with a dignity Tony could never fathom possessing. “But I tried. And so did you.”

“Yeah,” Tony whispers. “Yeah.”

“Blogging, huh? Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Think I’d be any good?”

“Absolutely not. I can’t wait to read it.”

Tony never sleeps well when it’s hot. The simmering summer air smells like grass and dirt up here, rather than sweat and cigarette smoke, but the heat makes him feel antsy, sick. It makes it hard to breathe.

He wakes up at 4:30 and doesn’t want to go back to sleep. He doesn’t want to get up either; go to the lab until Pepper’s awake, have breakfast with the hot, cloying air only worsened by the heat of the stovetop where Pepper makes scrambled eggs and toasts English muffins.

He wants to be sedated, he thinks. Surely no one would fault him for wanting a little bit of blissful, painless unconsciousness, today of all days.

The air is too hot. Tony kicks off his blankets, pulls off his sweat-soaked shirt.

Cicadas are still chirruping in trees whose leaves are rustling despite no cooling breeze blowing through them. The middle of August has always been— _had_ always been... _is_ Tony’s least favorite time of year.

Tears sting behind his eyes, adding to the heat all around him, the burning inside him.

He can’t stay in bed any longer.

He showers in the guest bathroom, so the sound doesn’t wake Pepper—the water too cold on his skin, so cold it makes his sternum ache, and he’s shivering when he gets out and goes downstairs, not bothering to towel dry his hair.

The light filling the kitchen is gray, already turning white. Early sunrises are another reason he hated summer as a younger man. He didn’t like to be woken up by the light after a long night partying, but he hasn’t slept in for years now. Can’t, most of the time. Didn’t want to, a year ago today. He’d been too excited, as if it had been his own...

It’s Peter’s birthday.

He sits at the kitchen island and stares out the window over the sink and watches the sunrise.

Tony can’t see the lake from where he’s sitting, but he can hear the splashing, the laughter, the shouts of a phantom child running and jumping in, the hot summer sun chasing away any cold that might linger in the water. Peter’s impressive acrobatics make May gasp and his friends cheer. The frosting is melting off the cake as it sits on the porch, half-eaten, the detritus of lunch and presents still at the picnic table.

He can envision it so perfectly. The way Peter glows in the light, in the affection.

The sunlight filters golden and piercing through the trunks of the trees and Tony blinks, and the image is gone. 

Sniffing hard, Tony rubs his face, dispassionately unsurprised to feel the tears there.

He can’t be here. In this house that Peter will never set foot in, in this kitchen where he’ll never spin on the bar stools while he waits for Tony to finish cooking dinner. In this life that Peter wouldn’t even recognize.

He can’t be the expecting father and newlywed husband and retired superhero. Not right now. Not today, it’s not—it doesn’t fit. Right now he does not exist outside his grief.

He can’t go back to being the Tony that Peter knew either. He can’t be the longsuffering mentor, the lab partner, the doting surrogate parent. 

He grabs the keys to Peter’s favorite car from the hook by the door.

The road is empty, stretching on before him, nothing to measure distance but the white lines darting passed him, and he lets himself imagine, for a moment, that he can drive forever, run from his grief and his responsibilities and his guilt for having kept living when Peter couldn’t.

But he knows he can’t and he knows he doesn’t really want to, despite himself. He wants that cabin by the lake, he wants his amazing, wonderful wife, and he wants his baby. He just wants Peter to be there too. He wants to be able to think about the future without his chest aching.

The greenhouse catches his eye and he slams on the brakes, the car stopping in the middle of empty road. There are so many plants hanging in front that the sign is nearly invisible.

Two weeks before the end of the world, he and Peter had helped plant trees for Earth Day. Well, he and Spider-Man. Service was always Peter’s thing, but he’d talked Tony into it, smiling and reciting facts about oxygen and climate change and Tony had agreed.

_“Sometimes it feels like all I do is destroy things,” Peter had murmured as he pushed the dirt over the roots to keep them warm, wiped his palms on the Spider-Man suit as if it was a ratty pair of jeans and not a multi-million dollar piece of tech._

_“It feels nice to help something grow for a change.”_

Tony does nothing so well as he destroys. He doesn’t think anyone has destroyed as much as him—not in all the annals of history, no conqueror, no tyrant has ever burnt the entire universe to ash like Tony has.

The greenhouse is still closed, because it’s 5:30 in the morning. Tony climbs out of the car, checks the hours on the door, then sits in front of it and waits, because here he is neither husband nor grieving almost-father. He can be a novice gardener: he can help something grow.

A half-rusted pick-up truck pulls into the parking lot some time later. Tony lifts his head and watches with dull eyes as a middle-aged man wearing sturdy work boots caked in mud climbs out.

“Can’t say I’ve ever had anyone waiting for me before,” the man greets casually as he comes forward, a big ring of keys jangling in his hand. Tony watches as he finds the right one with practiced ease, inserting it into the padlock on the door.

Tony doesn’t know what to say so he just mutters a soft, “Sorry.”

“No reason to apologize. What can I help you with?” The gardener swings the doors open and a wave of damp, scented air rushes over Tony’s face.

“I need a tree.”

Tony follows the man into the greenhouse, his muscles aching from his long wait.

“Any particular kind?”

“Um, no. I don’t know. I... I live upstate. By a lake.”

The man continues to walk, leading him through a maze of long low benches overflowing with flowers and trellises with vines climbing all the way to the ceiling. Tony turns his head this way and that, finding it easier to concentrate on the flowers than on the conversation.

He tunes back in as the man shows him a little tree in a pot. “—It’s known for its red and gold fall colors.”

“Red and gold, huh?” Tony asks, smiling faintly. He looks at the tag and sees that it’s called the Autumn Blaze Maple.

Peter loved autumn. He was one of those people that was decked out in sweaters and scarves and drinking cider and cocoa from the first day of September, even when it was still eighty degrees out.

“I’ll take it,” he murmurs, rubbing one of the leaves between his thumb and forefinger.

The greenhouse owner helps him get the tree to his car, balking a little at the expensive sports car that Tony carefully puts the tree in, uncaring about any scratches that might get on the leather seats.

“Thank you, sir,” he says as he prepares to climb into the car.

“Thank _you_ , Iron Man,” the man replies earnestly, his voice low.

Tony’s eyes burn. He clenches his jaw and shakes his head, then ducks into the car, slowly backing out of his spot.

He puts on Peter’s favorite playlist on the way back, the summer air already warm enough for him to roll his window down as the early morning sunlight floods the world in gold.

He hums along to the songs he knows well enough, his voice rough and cracking.

Fifteen miles from the lake house, he pulls onto the shoulder of the road, and rests his head on the steering wheel.

The tears come instantly. Tony has never been a big crier, but for the last four months, any time he’s alone he feels like he’s going to break apart, just cry until he dries up, until he resolves into a dew. Niobe reborn. There’s an endless well of grief inside of him and he fights it, all the time, around Pepper, around any of the team that bother to show up, but it builds and builds until he has to cry it out or he’ll burst.

He sits with his forehead against the steering wheel and listens to the tears dripping onto the leather upholstery and the soft guitar music in the background and breathes.

After a long time—three new songs that Peter loved—Tony sits up and looks out. The breeze that comes through the window smells like dry grass as it ruffles Tony’s hair and the leaves of the sapling. He closes his eyes for another long moment, remembers laying on the tower rooftop in the heat of August with Peter next to him, smelling of sweat and grinning in his Spider-Man suit.

He sniffs, wipes away the tears still clinging to his chin, and puts the car into drive, easing back onto the highway.

He doesn’t check if Pepper is still asleep when he gets home, but she isn’t out on the porch waiting for him like he’d half-expected. It’s only 6:45 and she’s been so tired lately. Tony makes her tired, even if she doesn’t say it. He’s happy to let her sleep.

He’s ridiculously, anxiously, worryingly cautious as he maneuvers Peter’s tree out of the car, making sure not one twig gets bent, not one leaf falls off. A therapist would have a field day, probably, Tony thinks, scoffing, but he isn’t any less careful as he crouches and lifts the base of the thing into his arms.

He doesn’t make it very far. It’s heavier than he expected, and he’s never bothered working on getting the muscle he lost back. He stops after fifteen yards, gently sets the tree back down, then bends over his knees huffing and puffing. Then he stoops and picks it up again. And walks and stops and pants and picks it up. His arms start shaking embarrassingly fast.

There’s a wheelbarrow in the garage. Some carts in his workshop. He could even call a suit, if he wanted to, just fly the tree to its spot on the lake and blast a hole in the ground and stick it in, but it’s Peter’s tree. It’s Peter’s tree and Tony’s going to carry it. He isn’t going to avoid it or find a shortcut or a cheat and he’s absolutely mental because it’s a _tree_ but it’s _Peter’s_ and he’s going to carry it, shaking arms and all, because he couldn’t carry Peter when it counted.

He’s sweating by the time he finally sets the tree down in the right spot, the sun already beating down on him. He goes and finds a shovel in the garage and gets a bucket of water, which he pours a little of into the pot even though the tree’s probably fine.

The first shovel-full of dirt is hard, baked in the heat of late summer. Tony carefully throws it away and gets another one, stamping down on the blade to get it to sink deeper.

He loses himself in the rhythm and sweat and monotony.

The hole expands until Tony can maneuver the clump of roots into it. He does, carefully, making sure it’s sitting level and deep enough. He fills in the hole with the shovel as much as he can, then kneels on the dry grass and pushes the soil up around the trunk as if he were tucking a child in.

The leaves of the sapling provide meager shade against the sun.

He stares down at his hands, covered in dirt. It’s underneath his fingernails, buried in the creases of his palms.

Tony rubs his hands together, smearing Peter’s ashes as his breath quickens, as the golden sunlight darkens until it’s bleeding orange. Every wheezing gasp makes the wound in his side ache with pain, makes his heart long to collapse in on itself because Peter’s gone. Dead and dusted—

Pepper finds him with his forehead pressed against the tree, tears watering the earth.

“Tony, sweetheart,” she whispers.

“It’s Peter’s—”

Peter’s birthday, Peter’s tree, Peter’s ashes. Tony had insisted on not giving him a funeral but had erected a gravestone anyway: here in his own yard, where he can see it from the kitchen window, the inside looking out of a new life that Peter will never get to have.

“I can’t leave him.”

“It isn’t Peter, Tony. It’s a tree.”

“I-I know that.”

“Then come inside,” Pepper coaxes, bending in a way that makes her sundress show off the little bump of her abdomen. “I made all of Peter’s favorites and they’re going cold.”

“Ok,” Tony says, brushing a kiss to his fingertips and then pressing them to a knot in the bark of the tree.

Later that night, lying in bed in the warm dark, Tony cries.

“I’m the only person left in the world that loves him,” he whispers to Pepper as she holds him. “I’m not enough.”

May, Ned, MJ, they’re all gone. Every person who would feel the hole that Peter left in the world like a gaping wound is gone and it feels like all the hurt they would have felt is his, like he needs to grieve for all of them because Peter deserves that much and more.

“I didn’t even do it right. I didn’t—I didn’t tell him.”

“But you loved him,” she says firmly, running her fingers through his hair. “That’s more than you had to do.”

“I loved him,” Tony agrees. “I couldn’t not.”

“That’s enough.”

He isn’t sure about that, but as much as hates it, it doesn’t matter now. He loved Peter when he was alive and didn’t show it. He loves Peter when he is dead and now all there is to do is show it to the world. To live it and breathe it in and suffer through it and let it change him. He doesn’t know how, yet, just like he still isn’t sure how to live in a world without Peter. He’s stumbling blind, but he’s pretty sure he’s moving forward. It’s all he can do.

Tony wakes up to the sound of retching and shakes his head to rid himself of the dream of Peter laughing.

“Babe?” He calls sleepily, making his way to the bathroom.

He finds Pepper there, sitting on the tile floor and wiping tears and sweat from her forehead.

“Let me find your medicine,” Tony says quickly.

“I already took it,” Pepper whispers pathetically, wiping tears off her chin. “I threw it up.”

Tony kneels in front of her, takes her face in his hands and wipes the tears away. “Are you in pain, honey?”

“No,” she says, but her bottom lip trembles. Her nausea has been terrible, but Tony has never seen her quite this upset.

“What’s wrong?” he whispers, and the tone he uses nearly sends him reeling back to days when Peter would come crawling in the window of his penthouse at 2 AM, crying because he couldn’t save the woman being attacked in time, because the robber shot himself before Peter could stop him, because he couldn’t be everywhere at once.

He swallows, forces himself back to the present.

“I just,” Pepper sobs. “I always thought my mom would be here.”

Tony’s heart sinks, his shoulders slump. Pepper’s mom had been one of the ones Snapped. They’d flown out to Illinois for the memorial and Pepper had born it with grace and decorum and steely strength while Tony had still been drowning under his own loss. He hadn’t been there for her like he should have been and if he had been in her position he might have hated her for it.

She never had. She had always understood.

The weight that Tony carries cannot be shoved aside. It cannot be lessened or lightened or shared. He does not know how to live his life with it constantly bearing down on him, pressing him backward down the hill, the stone getting heavier and heavier as he goes.

But his wife is sitting on the bathroom floor, crying because she misses her mom, because she’d always assumed that when she became a mother herself, she’d have her there to support her.

If Tony can’t bear his grief and support the love of his life when she has done nothing but comfort and strengthen him, what is the point of him?

He wanted to die when Peter did. Part of him did die, but it wasn’t the part that loves Pepper Potts. He’s ashamed it took him so long to realize that.

“What do you need, Pep?” he asks.

She whimpers as she holds out her arms and Tony instantly sweeps her into a hug, into his lap, and holds her while she cries.

He can be Sisyphus, rolling his stone uphill in atonement for his failure, and he can hold his wife. It’s progress. 

There are gummy bears at the check out line.

After the Snap, the survivors had gone insane trying to prepare for the end of the world that had already happened. Store shelves were emptied a mere hour after being stocked, prices of even the cheapest goods skyrocketed. It took nearly four months for production and consumption to start leveling out and even now you can only find non-perishable items with any regularity, unless you’re willing to pay a lot. Meat and vegetables are hit and miss delicacies.

This is the first time Tony has seen gummy bears since before that alien spaceship had appeared in the sky and he’s grabbing them and putting them on the counter before he even registers what he’s doing because he always used to buy them for Peter to eat while he did homework.

“Wait, one more thing,” Tony says, dashing back into the aisles, searching until he finds a familiar jar of JIF peanut butter. Smooth, not chunky. Peter hated chunky peanut butter.

When he gets home, a grocery bag in each hand, Pepper is in the kitchen, sitting at the island.

“Tony, you didn’t have to,” she says, but she’s smiling a little.

“Mm, it was more of a favor for the cashier actually. She looked bored out of her mind, thought seeing Tony Stark might cheer her up,” Tony says flippantly, unloading his purchases for Pepper to inspect.

“Oh, is that right? ... Did you buy gummy bears?”

Tony puts the frozen burritos in the freezer, then rubs the back of his neck. “Uh, yeah, well, you said you didn’t know what you wanted...”

Tony leans against the counter opposite Pepper, idly spins the package with a finger.

“They were the kid’s favorite,” he blurts after a minute. Pepper hums, her chin in her palm as she looks at him.

“He used to eat them with peanut butter ‘cause—teenage boys—freaking... aliens, I swear, just no taste buds at all.”

Pepper raises an eyebrow, then reaches across the counter for the jar of peanut butter. She opens it, then the gummy bear package, and unceremoniously dunks one head first in the thick spread.

She pops it in her mouth, licking the extra peanut butter off her fingers and chewing steadily. Tony feels stupidly nervous watching her, as if her not liking one of Peter’s favorite snacks will be a personal affront. But after a moment, she smiles, laughs.

“That’s actually really good.”

“Is it?” Tony asks, perking up. She nods again, going for another gummy bear.

“Try it.” Pepper offers the next one to him then prepares another for herself. They chew them together, both laughing a little bit because as bizarre as the combination is, it’s surprisingly good.

Pepper looks up at him and smiles, reaching across the island to take his hand. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

Tony smiles back, his own a little dimmer, a little less familiar. He hasn’t smiled without a shadow since coming back from space, but all that matters to her is that he still smiles.

“It was Peter’s idea,” he shrugs.

Pepper nods, stands and rounds the island to the sink. She takes the picture frame off the shelf, the one with Peter and Tony and that stupid certificate that Tony wishes he could find.

“Thanks, Peter,” she says, kissing her fingertips and gently caressing the image of Peter’s face.

Tony exhales a shaky breath, standing behind her and dropping his forehead between her shoulder blades, rubbing his hand along her arm.

Their home is warm and lit and the fire of the world has died down to smoldering ashes. He still chokes on it, sometimes. He still sits by Peter’s tree and hates every breath he takes that isn’t acrid and deadly because his every moment without the boy he loves like a son should be pain.

Peter wouldn’t want him to be in pain: Peter would want him to learn how to love his baby like he learned how to love Peter. He would want Tony to build a swing in the branches of his tree and play with his daughter in its shade. He would want him to eat gummy bears and peanut butter.

“Thanks, Peter.”

**Author's Note:**

> The beautiful line "the world has lost its shape. Everything is trivial and small. Everything is very, very still" is not mine, but taken from a couple different posts at TheGrievingDadProject, which is a support group for bereaved fathers. It was too good to change.
> 
> Yelling in the comments is most welcome :)


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